At least 128 people died and 200 remain missing after the towers housing 4,600 people were engulfed by flames.

People in Hong Kong are mourning the deaths of at least 128 people who died in the region’s largest blaze in decades in an eight-apartment residential complex.

The flags outside the central government offices were lowered to half-mast on Saturday as Hong Kong leader John Lee, other officials and civil servants, all dressed in black, gathered to pay their respects to those lost at the Wang Fuk Court estate since the fire on Wednesday.

Condolence books have been set up at 18 points around the former British colony for the public to pay their respects, officials said.

At the site of the residential complex, families and mourners gathered to lay flowers.

By Friday, only 39 of the victims had been identified, leaving families with the morbid task of looking at the photographs of the deceased taken by rescue workers.

The number of victims could still dramatically rise as some 200 people remain missing, with authorities declaring the end of the search for survivors on Friday.

But identification work and search for remains continues, as Lee said the government is setting up a fund with 300 million Hong Kong dollars ($39m) in capital to help the residents.

The local community is also pitching in, with hundreds of volunteers mobilising to help the victims, including by distributing food and other essential items. Some of China’s biggest companies have pledged donations as well.

The Wang Fuk Court fire marks Hong Kong’s deadliest since 1948, when 176 people died in a warehouse blaze.

At least 11 people have been arrested in connection with the tragedy, according to local authorities.

They include two directors and an engineering consultant of the firm identified by the government as doing maintenance on the towers for more than a year, who are accused of manslaughter for using unsafe materials.

The towers, located in the northern district of Tai Po, were undergoing renovations, with the highly flammable bamboo scaffolding and green mesh used to cover the building believed to be a major facilitator of the quick spread of the blaze.

Most of the victims were found in two towers in the complex, with seven of the eight towers suffering extensive damage, including from flammable foam boards used by the maintenance company to seal and protect windows.

The deadly incident has prompted comparisons with the blaze at the Grenfell Tower in London that killed 72 people in 2017, with the fire blamed on flammable cladding on the tower’s exterior, as well as on failings by the government and the construction industry.

“Our hearts go out to all those affected by the horrific fire in Hong Kong,” the Grenfell United survivors’ group said in a short statement on social media.

“To the families, friends and communities, we stand with you. You are not alone.”

SINGAPORE/LONDON, Nov 28 (Reuters) – Global futures markets were disrupted for several hours on Friday after CME Group, the world’s largest exchange operator, suffered one of its longest outages in years, halting trading across stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies.

By 1335 GMT, trading in foreign exchange, stock and bond futures , , as well as other products had resumed, after having been knocked out for over 11 hours, according to LSEG data.

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The disruption stopped trading in major currency pairs on CME’s EBS platform, as well as benchmark futures for West Texas Intermediate crude , Nasdaq 100 , Nikkei , palm oil and gold , according to LSEG data.

‘A BLACK EYE’

Trading volumes have been thinned out this week by the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday and with dealers looking to close positions for the end of the month, the outage posed a risk of spurring volatility, market participants said.

“It’s a black eye to the CME and probably an overdue reminder of the importance of market structure and how interconnected all these are,” Ben Laidler, head of equity strategy at Bradesco BBI, said.

“We complacently take for granted much of the timing is frankly not great. It’s month end, a lot of things get rebalanced.”

Still, the timing of Friday’s outage, during a shortened U.S. equity trading session with thinner volumes, helped limit its market impact.

“If there was to be a glitch day, today’s probably a good day to have it,” Joe Saluzzi, co-manager of trading at Themis Trading in Chatham, New Jersey, said.

“Beyond the immediate risk of traders being unable to close positions – and the potential costs that follow – the incident raises broader concerns about reliability,” said Axel Rudolph, senior technical analyst at trading platform IG.

A few European brokerages said earlier in the day they had been unable to offer trading in some products on certain futures contracts.

“My anticipation is that life goes on but everybody will have yet another look at their data centre arrangements and invest more in ensuring reliable supply because the importance of data center uptime is higher and higher,” Mikhail Zverev, Portfolio Manager at Amati Global Investors in London.

Regulators are tracking the situation, with both the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission confirming they are aware of the issue and conducting ongoing surveillance.

BIGGEST EXCHANGE OPERATOR

CME is the biggest exchange operator by market value and says it offers the widest range of benchmark products, spanning rates, equities, metals, energy, cryptocurrencies and agriculture.

Average daily derivatives volume was 26.3 million contracts in October, CME said earlier this month.

The CME outage on Friday comes more than a decade after the operator had to shut electronic trade for some agricultural contracts in April 2014 due to technical problems, which at the time sent traders back onto the floor.

More recently in 2024 outages at LSEG and Switzerland’s exchange operator briefly interrupted markets.

CME’s own shares were up 0.4% in premarket trading.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that head of the office of the president of Ukraine, Andriy Yermak, had written a letter of resignation.

“I am grateful to Andriy for always presenting the Ukrainian position in the negotiation track exactly as it should be. It has always been a patriotic position,” Zelenskyy noted, according to a translation of his comments in a video.

ZELENSKYY’S TOP AIDE ANDRIY YERMAK FACES CRITICISM AND SOME PRAISE AS WAR WITH RUSSIA DRAGS ON

“But I want there to be no rumors and speculation. As for the new head of the office, tomorrow I will hold consultations with those who can head this institution,” the foreign leader noted.

Yermak’s home had been raided by anti-corruption investigators.

MOMENTUM BUILDS IN UKRAINE PEACE PUSH, BUT EXPERTS FEAR PUTIN WON’T BUDGE

“Today, NABU and SAPO are indeed conducting procedural actions at my home. The investigators have no obstacles. They were given full access to the apartment, my lawyers are on site, interacting with law enforcement officers. From my side, I have full cooperation,” Yermak noted the Ukrainian-language post on Friday.

‘GOLDEN TOILET’ SCANDAL: ZELENSKYY FACES DEEPEST CRISIS YET AS ALLIES ACCUSED IN $100M WARTIME SCHEME

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President Donald Trump’s administration has been aiming to help broker peace between Russia and Ukraine.

Fox News’ Yulia Wallenfang contributed to this report.